We need the presence of somebody else to calm down. To know that I have somebody by my side that I can count on, who can support me, contain me, produces peace in me. But for that there must be self giving and mutual trust. It’s important to recognize that these roles can be interchangeable, and that, at the same time, I can feel contained and container; It’s as fundamental to be supported as much as to know I can support the other.
In the dance of tango we are able –starting with the embrace- to observe these phenomena. In a tango couple, what we register at first sight is this relationship container-contained. Discovering the other in the dance is to discover yourself, securing a path to our identity. This interaction in full contact with the other generates and fires the identification process, common at first with what is typical of the genres. For example the man (or the one that plays the active role) will assume his “conducting” role, rescuing his own virility. At the same time, the woman will deploy her own: receptivity and sensuality, but without leaving her role of “commanded-commander”.
In what’s peculiar, we observe that this game leads the way to a response that has to do with the personal. As long as we are guided by our subjective constitution in which the generational history meets with the personal history: tango is history and present time. In itself, this exchange is mobilizing and at the same time enriching, its cyclic reciprocity functions as a generator. What is produced in the couple is unique and unrepeatable.
This encounter refers us to even if it’s only for an instant to imagine us to be understood and supported as when we were babies and there was somebody else to turn to. In those first moments of the newborn we can observe the internal assembly of the pair (mother-baby), which is similar to the synchronicity of the fit of the couple of tango.
Behind this anguish there is emptiness, a lack that leads us to our initial desolation (when being separated from our mother). What we often experience in the dance couple is this return to undifferentiating, two bodies being one, it’s the return to the uterus or to those initial moments of union, with all it risky implication. The states of “fulfillness” and “magic” that the dance supplies to us makes us want to look forward this situation again and again, generating in us the circuit of return to it. Combined with the everyday the dance allows us to constantly give a new meaning to the unsatisfaction or frustration of life, increasing the tolerance towards it. Knowing that we can return to the encounter with those sensations or pleasant moments allows us to pass over in calm that ineffable original encounter.
Ignacio Lavalle
